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David Helvarg

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   David Helvarg
   David Helvarg

   David Helvarg (born April 10, 1951) is an American journalist and
   environmental activist. He is the founder and president of the marine
   conservation lobbying organization Blue Frontier Campaign, a part of
   the Seaweed rebellion, which arose from his second book Blue Frontier.
   His first book, The War against the Greens, puts a case that violent
   organized resistance is being orchestrated against the environmental
   movement.

   Helvarg began his career as a freelance journalist before becoming a
   war correspondent and then returning to news journalism. He writes
   about politics, AIDS, and sea life. He has reported from every
   continent and he has been published in specialist and popular
   magazines, and US newspapers both locally and in syndication. His
   experience of military conflict, civil conflict and marine biology is
   the basis of his lobbying.

Early life

   Helvarg was born April 10, 1951 in New York City, the son of refugees;
   his mother left Nazi Germany and his father escaped civil war in
   Ukraine. He grew up on Long Island, where he became a civil rights and
   anti-war activist. He attended Boston University and earned a
   bachelor's degree in history from Goddard College in Vermont, in 1974.

Works

Journalism

   While still a student, Helvarg traveled to Northern Ireland in 1973.
   The civil warfare known as " The Troubles" was at a height, and Helvarg
   submitted reports on the conflict to the Liberation News Service.
   Helvarg focussed on the role of women in the conflict, and highlighted
   allegations that agents of the British government had participated in
   sectarian murders. After graduating from college, he moved to San Diego
   to work as a freelance journalist. He published "Ireland Diary; A Day
   in the Life" in the underground publication San Diego Door, and wrote
   for the weekly newspaper San Diego Newsline.

   From 1979 to 1983, Helvarg covered the U.S. role in Central American
   conflicts, initially as a radio reporter for The Associated Press in
   Nicaragua. Exclusive reports from him included combat coverage of the
   first town to fall to Sandinista rebels, the first delivery of U.S.
   gunships to El Salvador, the first visit to Contra camps in Honduras,
   and the last interview with Sister Ita Ford before her murder. He was
   arrested by the Salvadoran army and deported from El Salvador in 1983
   while reporting on a massacre of civilians.

   After returning to California, he qualified as a private investigator,
   and resumed freelance writing. He wrote reports on underwater
   technology, articles about John Hoagland after conducting the
   photographer's last interview, and an interview with Jonas Salk.
   Helvarg became increasingly involved in television production, although
   he continued his freelance career. Throughout the late 1980s, his
   television topics were dominated by AIDS education, particularly for
   the Hispanic community.

   In the early 1990s, he began to research the conflict between the US
   free-market environmentalist group Wise Use and the green movement,
   which was eventually published as The War against the Greens in 1994.
   The Wise Use movement alleged that the US environmentalist group Sierra
   Club commissioned Helvarg to write the book as an anti-Wise Use tirade
   and that his sponsors also sponsored a road show to tie Wise Use to an
   alleged far-right terrorist network. The same article described him as
   "a private investigator" without mentioning his role as a journalist.

   A visit to Antarctica in 1999 became material for several articles and
   books, and a daily log was published in Slate, the online news
   magazine. His professional exposure to green activism and his ocean
   sports activities intersected in marine conservation, which became his
   focus. While researching his second book Blue Frontier—Saving America's
   Living Seas (2001), Helvarg concluded that marine conservation needed
   its own focal point for activism in the United States, so he moved to
   Washington, DC, and founded a lobbying organization: the Blue Frontier
   Campaign. He also became a member of the board of Reef Relief, a more
   specific marine conservation special interest, about which he had made
   a television documentary in 1994.

   Helvarg attracted nationwide US attention in early 2005 for a
   syndicated newspaper article debunking comments by conservative
   Christians (particularly James Dobson of the Focus on the Family) on
   the perceived homosexual tendencies of SpongeBob SquarePants, a cartoon
   character, by explaining the sexual biology of ocean life ( Los Angeles
   Times January 26, 2005). In response to suggestions by Dobson and
   others that the We Are Family Foundation was exploiting popular
   animated characters, including SpongeBob, to promote the acceptance of
   homosexuality among young people, Helvarg used these incidents as a
   springboard to describe the "immorality" in the oceans.

Books

The War against the Greens

   Helvarg's book The War against the Greens (1994) describes organized
   opposition to the environmental movement in the United States. He
   investigated the Wise Use movement, which he characterizes as a network
   of anti-environmentalist groups. Wise Use aims to facilitate extensive
   use of natural resources and to privatize the National Park Service.
   The first edition explored the origins of the organization in 1988 and
   its covert support by the administration of U.S. President George H.W.
   Bush. Helvarg identified its funding and the multinational corporations
   and other powerful figures with which it was associated. He catalogued
   the use of violence that he believed to be organized by the movement
   against environmental activists, and the ineffective response of
   law-enforcement agencies. A revised edition published in 2004 extended
   this to cover the early years of President George W. Bush's
   administration.

   Wisconsin Stewardship Network News described it as a book that
   "provides a fascinating and frightening insight into the violent fringe
   of the anti-conservation Wise Use movement [… and recommends it] in its
   entirety to readers who want a detailed examination of the origins,
   development and violent tendencies of Wise Use." The opposing view was
   put by Jesse Walker who, reviewing the book for American Enterprise,
   wrote that it "offers environmentalists a conspiracy theory to account
   for the populist backlash against their movement". Helvarg had accused
   Wise Use of astroturfing; Walker described his book as "a weapon in a
   propaganda war".

   War against the Greens is widely cited by activists inside the
   environmental movement (for example Community Rights Counsel and Land
   Tenure Centre ) and gave rise to numerous rebuttals from Wise Use and
   its supporters (including Ron Arnold).

Blue Frontier—Saving America's Living Seas

   Helvarg's second book Blue Frontier—Saving America's Living Seas (2001)
   was named on the Los Angeles Times "Best Books of 2001" list and an
   updated edition is due to be published in 2005. In it Helvarg explores
   the effects of human activity in general, and of commerce and policy in
   particular, on marine life. He postulates a trend towards destruction,
   and suggests that it is possible to reverse this. He then describes
   some of the people and groups that are working to preserve or enhance
   the marine environment.

   This book prompted Senator John Kerry to observe that "David Helvarg
   underscores the full measure of the challenges before us: If we hope to
   explore the Blue Frontier, we must travel cautiously, repairing the
   damage we have done, understanding before we exploit, and always
   preserving the natural systems that have created it." It was also one
   of the catalysts for the establishment of the Blue Frontier Campaign
   and has become a definitive text for US marine conservation
   (characterized as 'the Seaweed rebellion').

The Ocean and Coastal Conservation Guide

   Helvarg is the editor of Blue Frontier Campaign's first major
   publication: The Ocean and Coastal Conservation Guide (2005), a
   directory for those interested in the protection and restoration of
   United States coastal lands and waters. Blue Frontier Campaign plans to
   publish a new edition of the guide every two years.

   This reference book lists over 2,000 organizations involved in the
   conservation of the oceans and coastal areas that border the United
   States. Each entry includes contact information and a brief description
   of that organization's activities. The directory is divided into four
   listings: a geographical listings of groups; relevant government
   agencies; academic marine programs; and marine and coastal parks, and
   protected areas.

Feeling the Heat

   Helvarg contributed two chapters to Feeling the Heat—Reports from the
   Frontlines of Climate Change (2004): Chapter Eight 'Australia, Florida
   and Fiji: Reefs At Risk' and Chapter 10 'Antarctica: The Ice is Moving'
   are about threatened ecosystems.

   The book is a development of a suite of articles that appeared in the
   October/November 2000 edition of E/The Environmental Magazine. The
   publishers "aimed to move beyond the scientific debate […] to document
   […] the evidence for a changing climate". Each chapter is a first
   person account of places threatened by global warming. According to
   Helvarg, warming waters are killing the world's coral and threatening
   the extinction of Australia's Great Barrier Reef and the reefs around
   the Florida Keys, while the rising waters threaten to engulf the entire
   ocean nation of Fiji. In Antarctica he observed scientists measuring
   the krill population and concludes that the reduction that they found
   is a consequence of increased water temperatures.

Broadcasting

   Helvarg has produced more than 40 television documentaries broadcast by
   PBS, The Discovery Channel, and others. His 1986 documentary Sex Inc.
   was the highest rating show broadcast on the San Francisco PBS station
   KQED. Other documentaries focused on the military, politics, health and
   environmental topics. He is a commentator for the National Public Radio
   station Public Radio International's program Marketplace.

   His first documentaries drew upon his experiences as a war
   correspondent in Northern Ireland and Central America. When he moved to
   San Francisco he was commissioned to produce programs about AIDS
   awareness for the Hispanic community and these led to other
   documentaries about Hispanic health. In 1989 Globe TV commissioned a
   program about Greenpeace to coincide with the launch of the new Rainbow
   Warrior vessel. This brought Helvarg into contact with green activists,
   with whose cause he found he sympathized. He would return to green
   themes in 1991 and 1992 but in the meantime he continued to make series
   about health, and topical news. From 1992 onwards his energies were
   focussed on environmental programming with some health commissions.

   As of 2005 he continues to plan a series of documentaries about ocean
   stewardship to support the work of the Blue Frontier Campaign.

Blue Frontier Campaign

   In 2003 Helvarg founded the marine conservation activist organization
   Blue Frontier Campaign, of which he became the president. Originally
   entitled the "Ocean Awareness Project", the Campaign has established a
   nationwide network of grassroots lobbyists. It is campaigning for an
   American Oceans Act to protect what the members call "our public seas"
   and is working to improve federal and state policies on marine
   conservation. Helvarg writes articles on its behalf and is working on
   the production of film and television documentaries that promote its
   aims. He edited the 2005 - 2006 Ocean and Coastal Conservation Guide
   and has organized two conferences: in Washington DC in July 2004 and at
   the National Aquarium in Baltimore in April 2005. These conferences
   brought together activists, academics, officials, and politicians in a
   series of seminars. The Campaign is based in Washington, D.C., where
   Helvarg lives as of 2005.

Awards

   Helvarg won his first national award in 1988 when he won an Emmy for
   community service in recognition of his work on AIDS Lifeline, a
   networked television AIDS awareness campaign. His subsequent awards
   include two National Association for Interpretation awards for
   Interpretive Communications (in 1989 and 1991), the Nike Earthwrite
   Award (1997), a National Health Information Award (1999) and a CINE
   Golden Eagle Award (1999). In 2005, Coastal Living magazine gave him
   their Leadership Award.

Television and video work

     * 1982: Where The Bombs Are, Internment Memories, and Where Are They
       Now? (KFMB (CBS, San Diego).
     * 1983: Reports from Central America (Swedish TV Channel One),
       Soldiers & Rebels (PBS National), and Amphibious Assault (KFMB CBS,
       San Diego).
     * 1985: Each One, Teach One (Coalition of Hispanic Health).
     * 1986: In The Shadow of Marcos, Sex, Inc., and Navy Town. (KQED, San
       Francisco).
     * 1987: John Hoagland — Frontline Photographer (PBS), Zap, and
       Troubled Waters (KQED, San Francisco).
     * 1988: Critical Condition and Sexual Roulette (AIDS Lifeline — Group
       W Syndication), Coming of Age (Coalition of Hispanic Health & Human
       Services) and John Hoagland — Frontline Photographer (Discovery
       Channel)
     * 1989: Warriors of the Rainbow, Alex de Grassi's Music of Bolivia,
       and Treasure of Tiwanaku (Globe TV, A&E Channel) and Net Profits
       (KQED, San Francisco, MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour).
     * 1990: Passive Smoking, Couples And Money, Handicapped Kids Go High
       Tech, and Innoculations Make Sense (Special Reports, Whittle) and
       Al Giddings Gear and Crime Lab (The Next Step, Discovery Channel).
     * 1991: Traffic 2010 and Beat the Back-Up (KPIX CBS San Francisco),
       Nuclear Nightmare and Driftnet Pirates (Geraldo Rivera's Now It Can
       Be Told), and Who Bombed Judi Bari? (KQED San Francisco PBS & KCET
       Los Angeles PBS).
     * 1992: Las Medicinas y Usted (Council On Family Health), Green For
       Life (KRON NBC San Francisco) and BDF — The Baja Expedition
       (Pacific Coast Marine).
     * 1994: Wildlife Crime Lab, Seattle Spokes, Reef Relief and Clean Air
       Cabs (PBS National).
     * 1995: Heroes of the Earth — Choi Yul's Korea (Golden Gate
       Productions) and Para Vivir Bien (Coalition of Hispanic Health &
       Human Services).
     * 1996: Predator Friendly Wool (PBS National) and La Tardeada
       (Coalition of Hispanic Health & Human Services).
     * 1997: International Rivers Network and Rainforest Action Network
       (Video News Releases).
     * 1998: Demuestra tu Carino: Vacuna a tu Bebe (Coalition of Hispanic
       Health & Human Services).
     * 1999: Antarctica's Giant Petrels and Antarctica — Cold facts on
       Climate Change (both for CNN).
     * 2002: Blue Frontier (Video News Release).

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